Local authorities around the country spent almost €320,000 sending county councillors and officials abroad for St Patrick’s Day with one council accounting for nearly a third of the spending.
Limerick City and County Council spent around €100,000 sending no less than 27 politicians and officials to New York, Savannah, and London for the March 17 celebrations.
Another local authority – Wexford County Council – spent over €45,000 with councillors and staff jetting off to New York, Savannah, and the French city of Dunkirk.
Other councils were far more economical in comparison with just a single representative from Leitrim travelling to New York at a total cost of €1,937.
Galway City Council also kept costs to a minimum taking advantage of a free hotel stay in Seattle for their representatives for a total St Patrick’s Day bill of less than €5,000.
The authority responsible for running Dublin Airport repeatedly asked not to be hit with fines because of lengthy queues at the airport saying that it could compromise security.
In correspondence with the Commission for Aviation Regulation (CAR), DAA said their emphasis had to remain on safety, rather than waiting times.
And they said any over-emphasis on queuing times risked the potential for non-compliance with stringent EU rules on security.
In letters to CAR, the DAA wrote: “Our focus in security is to ensure that something does not get on an aircraft that shouldn’t, complying fully with all European and Irish regulations.
“While we do not want any passengers delayed coming through the screening process, our focus cannot prioritise this over passenger security and safety.”
Dublin Airport’s managing director Vincent Harrison added: “The re-introduction of fines increases the risk of focus being leaned too heavily on queue times, resulting in potential non-compliance with regulations.”
The DAA appealed for a ‘force majeure’ saying that the impact of Covid-19 had been so severe that there were no further reasonable steps they could take to improve waiting times.
A county council said there was an “inherent inconsistency” in having to make available video and audio recordings of development plan meetings claiming the Data Protection Commission had advised them not to release them.
Meath County Council said a decision made by the Information Commissioner that they must release the recordings was something they were “still trying to rationalise” in internal emails.
Officials said it was difficult to understand how “two arms of the state [can] provide very different advice on the same records”.
In an email to the Department of Public Expenditure, a local authority official said: “It is very difficult for a public body, such as this council, to navigate these choppy waters.”
Meath County Council were told late last year they had to release the recordings of the development plan meetings, which had caused considerable controversy among councillors.
The council had originally said release of the tapes would involve the disclosure of personal information, which would be in breach of GDPR, and had proposed deleting them.
However, the Information Commissioner disagreed and ordered their release in a decision with far-reaching implications for other local authorities and public bodies.
The case had originally been taken by FP Logue Solicitors on behalf of a number of councillors in co Meath.
The National Ambulance Service (NAS) received almost 1,400 bogus or hoax calls last year with every single call having to be thoroughly vetted to see first if it’s an emergency.
Figures from the NAS reveal how the number of prank or bogus calls began to rise sharply in the second half of last year from just 76 in the month of January to 151 by year end in December.
There were also higher rates of bogus or hoax calls in months normally associated with school holidays including June (152) and July (153), although the August figure was 125.
The NAS said calls were categorised as a hoax where the caller terminated the conversation before providing sufficient detail to warrant sending an ambulance.
They also arose where the criteria for dispatching an ambulance were not met or in cases where a crew did respond but nothing was found.
The NAS said emergency call takers had expertise in sifting out bogus calls through set questions for verifying whether an ambulance was needed.
They said: “Other indications are the caller laughing (adult or child). The trained emergency call taker would escalate a suspected hoax call to the control supervisor who would assess, analyse and make a decision on the authenticity of the call.”
The NAS said they had received more than 363,000 calls last year, of which only a small fraction were hoax calls.
Detailed data on the number of emergency calls showed spikes in January, July, August, and December when at least 32,000 calls were made each month, or at least 1,000 per day.
Marauding gangs of youths on commuter train services, stones getting thrown at buses, and trams being removed from service because of malicious damage were the key issues in a security update for the board of the National Transport Authority.
However, an internal presentation said that despite perceptions, the overall trend for anti-social activity on public transport was in fact reducing.
Another “noticeable trend” was that most of the anti-social problems being caused typically involved fare evaders, according to a presentation.
Taoiseach Michéal Martin and his team were left “stranded” in Brussels after an Air Corps aircraft scheduled to fly them home went out of service at the last minute.
The incident caused acute embarrassment in the Department of Defence who were told they had twice in quick succession been unable to support the Taoiseach for strategically important EU and international engagements.
In emails, senior officials at the Taoiseach’s department said the latest breakdown marked a “further deterioration” in the service being provided for flying ministers around the globe.
A garda internal audit found that some officers were claiming overnight allowances for overnight trips that had not taken place.
Garda management had approved the practice instead of allowing those involved to claim for overtime, according to an internal audit that was carried out.
The practice came to light after an anonymous complaint saw garda college management carry out an initial review before asking internal auditors to do a full inquiry.
The audit of travel and subsistence payments at the Garda College also discovered other issues including the claiming of travel and subsistence expenses by members not stationed there without pre-approval.
Also discovered were claim forms that were not properly filled out while others had “vague descriptions” of the nature and location of duties carried out.
Internal auditors said they could provide only “limited” assurance on controls in place because of what they described as the “significance” of their findings.
Facebook and Twitter are offering special support services for TDs and Senators who feel they are the subject of abuse online.
The two social media giants provided briefings to politicians earlier this year with both promising enhanced facilities for reporting harassment and other harmful content.
According to an internal Oireachtas paper, Facebook opened a new reporting channel that TDs and Senators can have direct access to.
They also promised to deliver briefings to politicians focused on “safety and security” for their use of both Facebook and their parent company Meta’s other major platform Instagram.
These seminars would take place in Leinster House and would be carried out on a regular basis to cater for all working there, according to the briefing.
It said: “Facebook to work with the Oireachtas in encouraging Members to use the [name redacted] reporting channel.”
Twitter said they would be carrying out “best practice” training for TDs, Senators, and their staff, with plans for a series of workshops.
A “partner support portal” was also made available to all political parties and groups with the Oireachtas to take a role in helping “expedite responses” to abusive material that was reported.
Twitter said they would “onboard” a centralised Oireachtas account to the portal that would allow for direct access to report abusive or harmful tweets.
The memo said: “This account owner can also act as a primary point of contact between Twitter and the Houses of Oireachtas for escalations.”
A small number of Irish jockeys were using vomiting to control their weight with more than half of jockeys saying it was a constant struggle to achieve the right weight for racing.
The disclosure came in research carried out by the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) ahead of moves to end the availability of saunas at racecourses.
More than 80% of jockeys wanted saunas kept open but research detailed how around 10% of jockeys are “severely dehydrated” when riding.
The records also warned of profound mental health effects from the use of rapid weight loss technique including “psychological distress, depression, anxiety, and adverse alcohol use”.
Earlier this year, the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) confirmed the permanent closure of saunas with jockeys given an extra weight allowance to create a healthier working environment for them.
The Information Commissioner was told government departments and public bodies were failing to resource Freedom of Information (FOI) properly and that public servants were not being given enough training to make good quality decisions.
A briefing for the recently appointed Information Commissioner Ger Deering said that public bodies had consistently failed to allocate enough resources to adequately fund FOI.
It also highlighted the failure of public bodies to make sure those tasked with making decisions had enough access to training, support, and expertise.
The analysis stands in stark contrast to comments made by Public Expenditure Minister Michael McGrath who has repeatedly claimed FOI is “robust and functioning well”.
The briefing – which was prepared late last year by officials – paints a somewhat bleak picture of information access in Ireland saying the Information Commissioner needed to do more to ensure public bodies dedicated adequate resources to FOI.
It said: “[We have] had very few interactions in recent years with heads of [public] bodies who might need some encouragement to make such commitments and it is an area in which we should do more.”
The briefing said FOI decision making was almost always “tagged on as an additional function” to civil servants who had other jobs.
And it said that FOI officers tended to be replaced quite regularly, thus “continuing the cycle of inexperienced decision makers making decisions”.
The Information Commissioner had themselves recruited somebody to develop an outreach programme to help public bodies whose decision making they considered “deficient”. However, this person had left their post with significant delays in filling the vacancy.
“As such, we have undertaken very little outreach work since May 2021,” said the briefing, “which we are keen to restart.”
The Information Commissioner (OIC) said they had their own difficulties in keeping staff with many of their senior staff taking advantage of a “mobility scheme” to move elsewhere in the public service.
The briefing explained: “OIC is experiencing higher staff turnover and are facing lengthy delays in having vacancies filled. The problems are more acute for the OIC, given the specific skills set we believe to be necessary for high calibre case workers.
“OIC has lost significant expertise in recent years, and it has a relatively inexperienced team overall. This is not helpful in circumstances where demand for our services has been increasing.”
The new Information Commissioner was also told of the “significant resource implications” of FOI decisions being appealed to court in terms of time and costs.
They said this influenced their approach to “engagement with parties to a review” and the level of detail they provided in their decisions.
The briefing concluded: “It remains an ongoing concern.”
A separate briefing for Ger Deering on FOI’s sister system for requesting records, the Access to Information on the Environment (AIE) Regulations, detailed how cases in that area had doubled in the space of three years.
It said that the current environmental and housing crises meant this would continue and explained how negative findings had been made against Ireland on how it dealt with such requests by the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee.
A slideshow presentation said that in one year 19% of cases they received were ending up in the High Court, but that this had brought “clarity to the law” and a subsequent fall-off in court appeals.
A spokesman for the Information Commissioner said that since the briefing was drafted in November last year, they had been able to recruit three additional staff.
He said: “In addition, existing staff have continued to further develop the skills and knowledge required to carry out their roles.”
The spokesman said that the newly appointed commissioner Ger Deering planned to engage with public bodies and raise all the issues highlighted in the briefing, including the lack of resources and training for information access.